The writing in this book got so much better than in the first one. It got very lyrical, had some nice/perhaps beautiful emotional quotes - I'm afraid those could get cheesy if you're not in the right mood for them,though. What definitely did get cheesy for my taste was the romance; I hadn't mind the romance in the first book - since the love triangle made quite some sense, too - but Cassia and Ky just got a bit too melodramatic. Maybe I wouldn't have find it sappy if it involved characters from any other book but I really began to not stand the main characters in this book. I mean, I thought of Cassia to be a drama queen since book one but in this one Ky and Xander began to get a bit hard to like, too (Obviously the sidekicks were the ones that saved me). I did appreciate the poems the overdramatic couple was exchanging, however, as I enjoyed the whole importance shown to poetry in this book.